Tuesday, August 28, 2012

For many who have broken the law, the real punishment begins
not when they are processed into prison, but when they are finally ejected from
their concertina-enclosed cages into a vengeful society that won't allow them to redeem themselves, branding them as forever bad.

Despite the stacked deck, some former prisoners do manage to
find a sense of hope and turn their lives around. Such desistance is especially
likely when society welcomes prisoners and restores their status as full
citizens. Indeed, a study by Florida's Parole Commission found that prisoners
whose civil rights were restored were far less likely to reoffend than those
who remained unable to vote, hold public office, sit on juries, or obtain
certain state licenses.

The film strikes an
optimistic note, citing increasing government interest in alternatives to
incarceration in these lean economic times. But a new study out of Colorado is
less sanguine, at least as far as the USA is concerned. Even as policy makers
give lip service to facilitating prisoners' successful "reentry" into the community, they
cling to a risk reduction model that hamstrings true reintegration, the researchers found.

The researchers tracked the work
of a Colorado state commission tasked with recommending changes in sentencing
policies aimed at reducing sentencing costs while increasing efficacy. Analyzing the commission's
discourse, study co-authors Sara Steen, Traci Lacock and Shelby McKinzey
of the University of Colorado discovered that a
powerful "imagined public" held these public servants hostage, forcing them to
look over their shoulders and censor their humanistic impulses lest they be perceived as soft on crime.

The public of the
commissioners' imaginations is a vengeful one, which promotes "victims’ rights"
as antithetical to the rights of offenders. In this "zero-sum" wordlview (as David Garland
labeled it in The Culture of Control), "concerns about offenders translate into
attacks on victims and vice versa, so that actors have to forge an allegiance
with one group or the other."

"This narrative implies that the real reentry problem
is that this population is reentering society at all (if it were not for the
expense, the reentry problem could be solved by keeping people who commit
crimes in prison forever). The moral undertone to this narrative is one of
anger and disgust toward (or, more mildly, frustration with) a group of
dangerous people who need to be watched. [Former prisoners] are not people we
want to help -- in part because they are, in some sense, beyond help…. [It] is
clear that there is some interest in improving offenders' lives, but the main
story driving the recidivism reduction narrative is that we (nonoffenders) should
invest in reentry to make ourselves safer."

Indeed, risk-driven discourse has so
become so naturalized that it takes a very active effort to step back and
realize that it is only one of several possible ways of thinking about citizens
who have committed crimes. Indeed, Shadd Maruna and Thomas LeBel (in an article available online) identified
two dominant recidivism-reduction narratives:

The CONTROL NARRATIVE views
ex-prisoners as dangerous creatures who require close supervision at all times.

The SUPPORT NARRATIVE regards ex-convicts as bundles of deficits with “needs” that must be attended
to.

Although these narratives are superficially dissimilar, in essence they are fundamentally alike in that both dehumanize and problematize former offenders. Indeed, the so-called "risk/needs" paradigm
so popular in forensic psychology circles arose squarely from the recidivism
reduction discourse that overarches both the control and support narratives. As
the researchers discovered in the Colorado case, much more time and energy is
put into risk assessment than in providing the external resources necessary for
change; “no matter how precisely one can measure an individual’s needs, without
resources to attend to those needs the measurement is in some sense
meaningless.”

Source: Steen et al (2012)

Imagined public: More vitriolic than actual public opinion?

The irony is that, in
their hearts, many public officials and practitioners would like to do more for
paroling prisoners, but are paralyzed by fear of a public that in reality may
be less vengeful than they imagine. As Steen and her colleagues note:

"Commissioners routinely raised the specter of public
discomfort with their recommendations, and they always assumed that the public
was punitive and would oppose reforms that benefited offenders in any significant
way. While the commissioners themselves had complex views of crime and
punishment, they almost universally
assumed a deeply simplistic view on the part of the public, a view based on
retribution to the exclusion of all
other considerations. Despite its mandate to continually draw on evidence to support
its conclusions, the Commission completely ignored (or was unaware of) recent social
scientific evidence of a shift in public opinion about crime and punishment."

They cited a 2002 poll conducted for the Open Society
Institute in which the majority of those surveyed believed that the primary
goals of the criminal justice system should be rehabilitation and crime
prevention.

In other words, public officials may be generalizing
about the public's attitudes based on a skewed perception created by handful of vocal -- and often rabid --
constituents. Because of this, public policy remains firmly entrenched in an
irrational, hysterical loop tape from which escape is nigh impossible. As the
Colorado researchers conclude:

"Many academics
equate reentry with rehabilitation, and assume that the popularity of the
reentry concept has resulted in discourse and policy that are friendly toward
offenders, decreasing the distance between 'us' and 'them'. Our analysis
suggests that reentry has not significantly changed the discourse, and we show
how practitioners and policy-makers have molded the reentry concept to fit
comfortably within the existing punitive discourse by focusing on recidivism
reduction rather than reintegration…. In the end, we rather pessimistically
conclude that the high hopes of many that reentry could fundamentally change
the nature of punishment discourse in the 21st century is to date misplaced."

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Karen Franklin, Ph.D. is a forensic psychologist and adjunct professor at Alliant University in Northern California. She is a former criminal investigator and legal affairs reporter. This blog features news and commentary pertaining to forensic psychology, criminology, and psychology-law. If you find it useful, you may subscribe to the newsletter (above). See Dr. Franklin's website for more information.

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